Google is rewarding websites, which use secure connections (HTTPS) for customers’ usage and other activities, with better search ranking.
In a way Google would push down websites in its search engines that do not have secure encryption. The decision has been taken for quite some time and especially after the 2013 Snowden revelations, alerting major websites that information on their portals needs better security.
In fact, Google has shifted to a secure channel for its Search, Gmail and Drive products and is urging other websites to take similar steps to protect the interest of their customers. Google latest move seems to be a way to pressuing website owners and developers to adopt HTTPS to secure data of customers from hackers.
“over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms”, said Google in a blog post.
“We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal—affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content—while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS.”
Data theft has been a major issue over the years and websites despite knowing about the dangers have not put in enough efforts to secure their websites. In fact, 375 million customer data were compromised in the first half of 2014.
Meanwhile, it is being reported that second version of the HTTP may only work with HTTPS addresses and so webmaster may have to make the necessary changes and develop their sites with the upgrades in the near future.
The title of this article is absolutely ridiculous.. People aren’t getting penalised for not going behind HTTPS – Google have just said that they’re giving a slight improvement to people who put their website behind SSL certificates.